Transmigrated into Eroge as the Simp, but I Refuse This Fate - Chapter 370: A maid's psyche

Chapter 370: A maid’s psyche

Blackthorne Villa. 07:24 AM, just as Damien leaves.

The door hissed shut behind him.

A moment later, the silence returned.

No more footsteps echoing down the hall. No more casual barbs thrown over a shoulder. No more low, deliberate laughter that lingered longer than it should have.

Just stillness.

Elysia stood in the foyer for several seconds after Damien had left—expression unreadable, spine straight, hands loosely folded at her front. The AI registered his vehicle clearing the gate. The security system recalibrated.

The house began to settle.

She turned.

And resumed her routine.

***

Breakfast cleared. Dishes washed, dried, and shelved. Not by hand. By presence.

She didn’t do dishes, not in the traditional sense. A combat maid of her standing didn’t have to. The villa’s systems handled the basics. Countertops wiped themselves. Dust was non-existent. Waste sorted, recycled, and sterilized by unseen vents.

Her being here was not for order.

It was for response.

Yet she still swept the floors.

Still wiped the table after the bots.

Still inspected every corridor and scanned the mana-seal junctions in the walls for variance, even though she knew they were pristine.

It wasn’t obligation.

It was readiness.

A still blade dulled. A maid that waited was a weapon already obsolete.

*****

Training room.

The space was white, sterile, reinforced for high-impact combat.

No mirrors. Just stone and steel and the hum of resistance nodes embedded into the walls. Her regulation maid uniform was gone—replaced by tight, sleeveless training fabric. Her hair was pulled back. Her expression blank.

A line of reinforced mana dummies stood before her. Combat models calibrated to simulate full-speed, high-lethality exchange. Unforgiving.

Exactly how she preferred them.

She moved.

KICK!

Her heel struck out in a flawless arc—no wasted motion, the torque spiraling from her hip, through her core, into the ball of her foot.

Except—

MISS.

Her foot whiffed past the target by less than a finger’s width.

The dummy’s counter-sensor flared.

WHAM.

The blow landed just under her ribs, a blunted piston-arm shooting forward, calibrated to strike at a level meant to stagger a standard Awakened.

She absorbed it.

But it landed.

Her body reeled half a step. Just one.

But enough to register.

Her eyes narrowed.

Her heel landed again.

This time the strike connected, the dummy’s frame shuddering under the impact, but Elysia didn’t feel the familiar satisfaction of precision. Her ribs still ached faintly where the counterstrike had landed. That shouldn’t have happened. Not with her timing. Not with her conditioning. She had executed that motion thousands of times, her body moving like clockwork—predictable, perfect.

And yet her focus wavered.

She pivoted sharply, shifting her weight into a low stance, hair clinging to her neck from the fine sheen of sweat that was already forming. Her breathing was steady—always steady—but something under it felt uneven. As the next dummy lunged forward with a piston strike, she swept her arm in a clean intercept, driving her palm into its core before twisting and snapping a kick into its flank. It fell back, recalibrating. She moved again, smooth as always. And still—something was off.

Her eyes narrowed as she reset her stance. “Why…” she murmured softly, the word barely leaving her lips. She didn’t speak during training. She didn’t need to. But the whisper slid out unbidden.

It wasn’t fatigue. It wasn’t distraction. She had trained herself to fight blindfolded, to spar on no sleep, to endure pain without losing rhythm. Damien leaving was nothing new; every day he went to Vermillion High, she stayed here, prepared, honed. She never faltered.

Then why today?

Her next combination came harder, faster, a blur of fists and feet as she forced herself into a rhythm. Strike, block, pivot, strike. The dummies adapted, their counters becoming more aggressive as the system detected her elevated output. The training hall echoed with the sound of impact—flesh against reinforced mana composites, boots scraping the polished floor.

She thought of him. She didn’t want to. But she did.

Damien had left before. Always with that lazy smirk, always with some faint glimmer in his eyes like he was five steps ahead of a board only he could see. But this morning, his voice on the call to Dominic had been different. Steady, but with a thread beneath it. Not resignation. Not fear. Something heavier.

The Cradle.

Her breath hitched—not enough to break her pattern, but enough for her to feel it.

She drove a knee upward, slamming into the dummy’s center, then twisted away from a retaliatory strike. It grazed her shoulder. Another mistake.

She clenched her jaw.

Damien had reassured her. He would come back, he said. As if his word were a promise carved into stone.

And she had nodded, silent, composed, as always. Because she was trained to accept such things. To hold her posture. To never question.

But there it was.

A thorn under her ribs. A splinter buried deep, invisible yet impossible to ignore.

Her palm crashed into the next dummy’s head hard enough to knock it sideways. It rotated back, already recalibrating, and she moved to meet it, faster now.

Her strikes blurred until the algorithm’s sensors lagged behind her movement, the room filled with the sharp, percussive rhythm of combat.

‘It’s nothing,’ she told herself, though she didn’t say it aloud this time. ‘It’s routine. It’s the same as every morning.’

But her body disagreed. Her muscles were tight, her precision half a breath late, as if her instincts were watching a door instead of her opponent. Watching for his return.

She stepped back, chest rising and falling a little faster now. The dummies stood waiting, unfeeling, their sensors glowing faint red. She could end the session. She could meditate, regulate, control.

Instead she surged forward again, a low growl slipping through her teeth as her strikes came heavier, sharper, the air itself shuddering with each blow. She drowned herself in movement, in force, in the clean geometry of violence.

It was the only way she knew to silence the thought, the thorn, the crack in her rhythm.

But even as she moved, even as she punished herself for every missed inch, every microsecond’s hesitation, the thought lingered—sliding between the blows like a whisper.

‘What if he doesn’t come back?’

*****

The villa was silent.

It always was in the early hours—air smooth and filtered, systems cycling through their maintenance quietly, light panels set to the dim, natural hue of a pre-dawn glow.

But this morning, the silence felt different.

Elysia sat alone at the edge of the training hall, her posture rigid, legs folded beneath her with precision. She hadn’t activated the dummies. Not yet. Her hair was still tied back. Her body still bore the slight bruising from the previous day’s exertion—marks that would fade in hours, of course. Her healing factor was more than sufficient.

That wasn’t the problem.

She hadn’t slept.

Not properly. Not since Damien had left for the Cradle.

Two days ago.

One night in between.

And something was wrong.

Not with the house. Not with the perimeter or the mana lattice or the systems—which she’d checked six times. Not with her own condition, either. Her reflexes were intact. Her power output hadn’t wavered.

But inside—beneath the layers of habit, under the clean, honed edges of training—there was a knot.

She’d felt it growing across the two days. Subtle at first. Like tension after battle that never bled out. But now?

It felt like a hand gripping her from the inside.

Too soft to scream. Too firm to ignore.

She closed her eyes.

Tried again.

Inhale.

Exhale.

Still, it didn’t leave.

‘He’ll return,’ she told herself. Again. Not a whisper—just a thought, recited like scripture.

He had said so. With that smirk of his. That ridiculous, irreverent grin. That damnable confidence.

And he meant it.

Which was the worst part.

Because he wasn’t lying. Not to her.

And yet—

Her fingers twitched once against her thigh.

She stood.

Walked.

The hall felt colder now. Not temperature. Space.

The emptiness wasn’t physical. The villa was never crowded. But Damien’s absence wasn’t just visual—it was structural. He filled places by being, by moving, by disrupting the rhythm of silence in a way she had come to memorize.

And now she was memorizing something else.

How long absence could stretch before it felt like erosion.

She entered the kitchen. Didn’t need to. The systems had already calibrated breakfast based on projected macros for when Damien should return. His portions were loaded. Ready. Vacuum-sealed in sleek containers labeled with today’s date.

She stared at them for a long time.

Then opened the fridge.

Removed them.

And set them out anyway.

Routine.

Always routine.

But even as she did it, her eyes flicked—not to the clock, not to the AI display—but toward the villa’s central comm panel. The encrypted one. The one linked to the Elford Mansion’s private network.

Her throat tightened.

Then released.

She turned away before she could entertain it further.

No.

She was a combat maid of the Elford lineage. She had been trained in their code. Tempered by Vivienne’s personal oversight. Refined in everything from assassination to etiquette. And above all else—

She did not overstep.

Personal matters did not concern her. A maid did not probe. A maid did not question. And certainly—a combat maid did not seek updates on her master’s condition unless directly instructed.

That was the first rule.

Loyalty was not interference.

It was restraint.

Still…

Her gaze returned to the panel.

And lingered.

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